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Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Information Technologies (InfoTech-2020) 17-18 September 2020, St. St. Constantine and Elena, Bulgaria Monitoring real time the Arachthos River (Greece) using a Web GIS platform Petros Karvelis, Dimitris Salmas and Chrysostomos Stylios Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Ioannina Kostakioi, 47150 Arta, Greece [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] information about the flood condition of the area of interest. Abstract – Flood Risk poses a serious threat for communities living near rivers. The scope of this work is to present the The back-end has three main components, the database that design and the stages of a web–based GIS (Geographic hosts all the data of the project, the web server that is Information System) regarding the flood potential of the river responsible to handle the communication between the client Arachthos in the Epirus region. All the technologies and and the database, and the data processing server that equipment installed are presented in detail. All the components retrieves the data from various sources, process them and of the system can be monitored by a web page making it save them in the database. available to the public. This system will serve as a trustful and accurate provider of information regarding real-time monitoring of the river flow and the early warning in cases of possible floods. Keywords – Floods; GIS; WEB-GIS, Environmental Monitoring I. INTRODUCTION Due to the rapid development of the computer industry and the improvement of Internet technology combined with the demand for GIS, it has become crucial for the GIS to utilize web techniques, publish spatial data and provide users with spatial data browsing, searching and analysis function. GIS that is based on internet technology is called WebGIS. The WebGIS advantage is that the information exchange via the world wide web between client and server[1]Unlike the desktop GIS, the user can access the WebGIS via their web browser from everywhere while the Fig. 1. The System Architecture system’s databases are stored on the cloud [2]. In 2015, the lowland area of Arta, Greece suffered from a III. HARDWARE INSTALLATIONS flood near the area of the river Arachthos revealing the need for a tool to monitoring the area around the river. The WebGIS platform consists of two parts, the front-end The authors of this paper developed a WebGIS for the and the Back-end. The main component of the front-end is monitoring of the area with the creation and operation of an the client that is responsible for providing valuable online database and with the use of special equipment that information about the flood condition of the area of interest. was installed in the area of interest as part of the The back-end has three main components, the database that WatchArachthos project. The information system provides hosts all the data of the project, the web server that is targeted information for local authorities, citizens and responsible to handle the communication between the client multiple groups of stakeholders. The area of interest is the and the database, and the data processing server that Arachthos River and its catchment area in the regional unit retrieves the data from various sources, process them and of Arta in northwestern Greece. Specifically, the area of save them in the database. interest is the section of the river downstream of the Pournari I Dam about 11 km long, as well as the Municipalities of A. Meteorological Stations Arta and Nikolaos Skoufas. Arachthos River is the longest river of Epirus with a length of 110km and drains into the For the needs of the project, two meteorological stations closed Amvrakikos gulf [3]. were installed in vital locations. The meteorological stations The authors in this paper present their WebGIS and its were installed on the accommodation halls of the University functionalities. of Ioannina in, Arta, Municipality of Arta and in community office of Agia Paraskevi, municipality of Nikolaos Skoufa II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE (Figure 2). The meteorological stations that we are using are the Davis Vantage Pro 2. The Davis station provides its The WebGIS platform consists of two parts, the front-end Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that gives and the Back-end. The main component of the front-end is access to the current data. It can measure rainfall, pressure, the client that is responsible for providing valuable 978-1-7281-6913-2/20/$31.00 ©2020 European Union 38 wind direction, wind speed and temperature that are used The sensors were the SYMMETRON’s Stylitis 20; which from the project [4]. use a battery as power supply and sends the data via General The meteorological stations are set to upload their data Packet Radio Service (GPRS). The Stylitis sensor sends the every ten minutes in the open database of Enhydris. water level of the river and the remaining voltage of the Enhydris is an open-source database system which provides battery data every 30 minutes as text file. It also stores in the meteorological and hydrological data from stations located system memory data up to 4MB [6]. The data are stored as all over Greece. Enhydris provides an API that is used to files in the server where they get processed by the data retrieve the meteorological data [5]. The meteorological processing service and stored in a proper format in the stations that are retrieved from Enhydris API are the stations database of the project. in Kampi, Kompoti and Kommeno. IV. TECHNOLOGIES A. Front-end Client The front-end of the WatchArachthos is a modern Web- based GIS application that gathers and visualize useful information from satellite datasets, national datasets provided by the local authorities, as well as measurements from meteorological stations and water level sensors. The front-end component is divided into three main parts. The first part is the web page development and its design. The second part is the visualization of geographical data with the use of the Google Maps [7], on a responsive map. The third part of the client is the representation of the data retrieved from the meteorological station and the water level sensors. Those data include several weather parameters such as rainfall, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure retrieved from various meteorological stations all over the area of interest as well as the water level of the river from two different sensors installed in different locations. 1. Webpage Fig. 2 The Locations of the installed meteorological stations The front-end of the WebGIS was created with the use of B. Water Level the following scripting languages, Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) [8] /Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) [9]/ Two water level sensors were installed in the area of JavaScript [10] /jQuery [11]. With the use of those scripting interest. The first sensor was installed in the Arta's Bridge languages the website created with a fully responsive design, municipality of Arta 16 cm above the bottom of the river. ensuring the good viewing experience, to the user, using any The second sensor was installed in Neoxori Bridge, device (mobile or tablet). The combination of CSS and Municipality of Nikolaos Skoufas 1.6m above the bottom of jQuery were used to develop a responsive multi-dropdown the river (Figure 3). menu. The menu (Figure 4), consists of the following four categories: • Meteorological Data: This menu hosts the data that are received from the Meteorological stations and water level sensors. • Geographical Data: This menu hosts different data layers that have been obtained from various sources. In case of emergency, local authorities can use that crucial information. • Historical Data: This menu displays the layer of previous floods. • Flood Information: This menu displays the data for the flood risk. Each category contains several data as shown in the figure below. All the elements of the web site were developed with the HTML and was styled with the use of the CSS. JavaScript is a programming language that was created mainly for websites and was used in order to execute the Fig. 3. Location of the water level sensors scripts, that are attached in several elements of the WebGis and the jQuery was used to in order to change the style of the elements on demand. 39 Fig. 4. Main Menu Options 2. Map The Google Maps Platform is a set of APIs and Software development kit (SDKs) that allows developers to embed Google Maps in their applications. The WatchArachthos’ Fig. 6. Polygon KML of the river area webGIS is using the Google Maps API. The Google Maps API provides a set of tools to visualize data, and especially 3. Data Series geographical data, on the embedded map. Those tools vary and help us to plot the different layers. GIS data can be Data from the five meteorological stations and the two separated into two categories, raster and vector data. The water level sensors are stored in the database of the WebGIS. raster divides the spatial area into grids of the same size with Each meteorological station provides data for rainfall, wind each being assigned a specific value, representing different speed, wind direction and barometric pressure every ten geo-referenced data. The vector data use points, lines and minutes and the water level sensors provide the water level polygons to represent different spatial data [7].The raster every thirty minutes. Those data are represented in the files in the webGIS are created from the data that are stored WebGIS in two ways. The first is with graphs and the second in the database and are updated every hour. The client is is a panel that shows the latest records of rainfall and the using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) from water level.